LECTURES AND ESSAYS READ AT INSTITUTES. 139 



principles of breeding, and understand that it is as necessary first to lay a foun- 

 dation, for a breed of horses as for any other structure, and that to secure this 

 foundation, they must fix upon a certain line of breeding and foUoiv it persist- 

 enth/fYeta^iniug the best mares, we need expect no decided improvement and no 

 uniformity in breed. 



By the popular clamor for Hambletonians or Lexingtons the otherwise intel- 

 ligent farmer is too often beguiled by the oily tongue of a cross-roads horse 

 keeper to breed to a bogus pedigree and an unsound horse. He forgets 

 that Lexington was a homely, clubheaded liorse, having only speed to com- 

 mend him, and his ability to transmit speed was balanced by his liability to 

 transmit blindness. Hambletonian, head of the greatest family of trotters, was 

 a '''coarse critter" with a head like a barrel, impressing one indeed with maj- 

 estv and power, but siring animals of all sizes without any uniformity. You 

 may be pretty certain of getting big-headed, leggy, weedy, loosely-coupled, 

 loose-jointed, light-boned, slab-sided, ewe-necked, cat-hammed, calf-kneed 

 scrubs of colts, so long as you breed the banged up old mare, with all tlie con- 

 stitutional diseases, to the wheezing, stiff-necked, stiff-kneed, spindle-shanked, 

 gimlet-rumped plug, — called the son or grandson or great grandson of Ham- 

 bletonian or Lexington or Messenger, brought to the neighborhood by some 

 guileless benevolent missionary who does business on a ten cent, three-for-a- 

 quarter scale, and has no scruples against helping to perpetuate a race of 

 churn-headed, light-waisted, fiddle-flanked, steeple-hoofed, switch-tailed 

 caricatures of the horse. 



The history of the American trotter proves that when there is a demand for 

 a horse with well defined qualities, the evolution of the animal is certain. In 

 this case speed at the trot was the one thing desired ; and the breeder used the 

 horse that could win the race, and get winners, whether he were big or little, 

 ■white or black, sound or unsound, vicious or docile, homely or handsome, 

 coarse or fine, thoroughbred, cross-bred, or hybrid. 



The thoroughbred has been established to meet a demand. The trotter has 

 been established to meet a demand. We are in a position to establish a breed 

 of farm horses more quickly, more easily, more certainly, and of better 

 quality, just as soon as v/e are proud enough not to accept for our stud what 

 is too slow for the track or road, too light for the truck, and too homely for 

 the coach. The valuable blood of the thoroughbred racer appears promi- 

 nently on our trotter; it has enriched the pacer, the coach horse, the draft 

 horse, and tiie general horse. Speed, form, endurance, beauty, nervous 

 organization, ambition, courage, are the qualities he has engrafted on mongrel 

 stock wherever the horse is a domesticated animal. If the racer brought with 

 him gambling, cursing, swearing, drinking, the eating of oysters, and a dis- 

 taste for mobcaps and the middle-aged virtues, he still makes the nag we drive 

 every day pull truer, last longer ahd evince more courage; he gives finish and 

 dash to the saddle-horse and he lends grace and pluck to the light harness 

 horse ; superb in outline, perfect in form, finished in contour, endowed with 

 brain, fleet of limb, — he is still the most nearly ideal horse. Whether speed 

 instinct is imparted to the trotter, by the imported thoroughbred, or has been 

 engrafted on our horses by American trainers, and American breeders, who 

 began the development of the American trotting action, when neither the 

 thoroughbred nor the native had any trotting instinct or inheritance, does not 

 matter. By training and breeding through successive generations there has 

 been envolved a breed of trotters full of trotting instinct and inheritance, and 

 possessing strength of bone and muscle, endurance, activity, symmetry of 



